With the release of Echo bringing the MCU back into the gritty criminal world that was, long ago, the bread and butter of its TV series boom on Netflix, much has been made of the show’s repositioning of Marvel’s canonical context to that era through characters like Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin. But according to the latter, that push only really began when Marvel had to take a hard look at its approach to its faltering Daredevil revival.
Daredevil: Born Again was first announced at San Diego Comic Con 2022, but last year was reported to have faced a major creative overhaul after its original creators Chris Ord and Matt Corman were replaced with just under half of the originally planned 18 episodes of the series already filmed. Suddenly with a new creative team in place, we went from hearing how Born Again was more focused on legal drama and distanced itself from what came before in the Netflix show, to reports that the show would now after all reunite crucial characters from that series, like Deborah Ann Woll and Elden Henson as Matt Murdock’s closest friends Karen Page and Foggy Nelson. So it makes sense that apparently part of that overhaul was a focus on more explicitly tying Born Again back into the stories told across the three seasons of Netflix’s Daredevil show.
“During our restart of all the creative on Daredevil: Born Again, all the creatives got together and said, ‘Look, this is how we’ve got to do it now,’” Vincent D’Onofrio recently told the Hollywood Reporter about the decision to formally re-canonize Daredevil. “So we are for sure only speaking about it in terms of being directly connected to the original Daredevil, and that’s a great thing. It brings in a lot of cool stories and all the collateral story that happened in those original three seasons.”
It’s unsurprising considering that everything we heard about Born Again’s reset has been to realign it with the grittier, action-driven tone of the original Netflix show. And now, as we await whatever Daredevil: Born Again has become, we’ve already seen Marvel and Disney play up just when and where all those original stories should be woven into its so-called Sacred Timeline. Now it just remains to be seen how much that official MCU seal of approval will actually mean to the stories the new show wants to tell in the wake of a series that changed so much for Marvel’s televisual ambitions all those years ago.
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